Polymers are well known as alternatives for a wide variety of common materials, and they have successfully replaced these materials in many different applications. However, numerous desirable properties, for example, such as electrical conductivity, modified dielectric constant, etc., cannot be achieved in pure polymers. To overcome these difficulties, innovative efforts have concentrated in the past few years on the development of systems which meet these needs in a better way. One such avenue of approach has been the formation of polymer/metal systems designed to combine, at least partially, the properties of both polymeric and metallic materials.
Polymer/metal systems of various types are well known, therefore, as are common procedures for obtaining such systems, e.g., the dispersion of metal powders or fibers in polymeric resins or the addition of metallic traces in the form of catalysts or organo-metallic complexes during the polymerization process. Various types of such procedures have been extensively described in the literature. Among these are: Mixing of fine metal powders with the polymeric component of the system, followed by hot pressing and/or extrusion; electropolymerization; catalytic copolymerization; in situ sputtering of metals onto polymer substrates; plasma polymerization; lamination of both components; and intermixing of inorganic metal salt solutions with polymer solutions. However, none of these methods is able to generate very thin polymer/metal films, i.e., films the thickness of which is on the order of magnitude of about 500 .ANG. to 1000 .ANG. (50-100 nm). Principally the reason for this inability appears to be that, at those film thicknesses, the tendency of the metal phase is to separate from the polymer phase because the metal phase is far thicker than the polymer film itself, which leads to cracking and progressive deterioration of the films. The various known methods also do not enable the arrangement of the metal phase in the respective systems to be influenced by the polymer morphology.